Welcome to the next blog in the series “How to Walk the 12 Steps with the HuMethod™. Remember, these HuMethod™
exercises don’t replace the proven 12 Steps. They are a bridge that you can take that will introduce you to advanced tools to enhance and accelerate your recovery journey.

Starting with Step 1, I am using terminology that may cause your E.G.O. [Edging God Out] to say “Hey, wait a minute there. I’ve been using the 12 Steps in my recovery journey for ‘x’ years and it’s worked just fine for me so far.” I agree because the 12 Steps have worked for me as well, and I am here to share some additional recovery tools that you can use to enhance this journey. Join me with a coachable beginner’s mind and give yourself permission to soar even higher with these empowering tools.

Step 1 states that I am powerless over alcohol (people, places and things) and because I could not accept that powerlessness my life had become unmanageable. When I take this step using the HuMethod™, I am learning how to dis-identify with my ego-mind thoughts. I’m dis-identifying with my job titles and roles that kept my life unmanageable. I am saying that “I’m ready to change”. I have a beginner’s mind and I’m ready to do something different. I may not yet consciously believe it, but I am making contact with a power greater than me.

I don’t know about you, but my ego-mind thoughts could tell me anything was true, and since I functioned solely in my ego-mind, I would believe these thoughts, and then react to them based on the history of me. This caused my life to be unmanageable because I always thought I had to ‘do’ something. I could not ever just ‘BE’.

As I continue my Journey Home to my Self, I wanted to learn how to tell when my ego-mind thoughts were speaking to me vs. my Higher Power.

The distinction between how my Spirit feels, as opposed to how my ego mind feels. My Higher Power speaks to me through the language of feelings and my ego-mind speaks to me through the language of words. Until I learned how to tell the difference between Spirit (Higher Power) and ego-mind, my ego-mind had me re-acting to life vs. surrendering and allowing my Higher Power to guide me.

The distinction between “thinking” thoughts about my “feelings” vs. actually feeling and releasing my feelings. This was a huge distinction for me to learn because the two main feelings my ego had me believe I had were ‘fear’ and ‘anger’. Everything fell under these two categories. When in actuality, I wasn’t feeling ‘fear’, I was blocking my feelings of fear with anxiety and always acted uncertain about everything I did. I blocked my feelings of anger with blame and felt betrayed by people. Today I know that I can feel my feelings of anger which help me protect me and my boundaries, learn what I need to learn about the feeling and then release the energy. I’ve learned that my feelings aren’t good, bad, right or wrong. They just are! Today I know that when I learn how to feel and release my feelings the better I’ll feel and the faster I’ll heal.

The distinction between the… Being and the being’s behavior.This distinction helped me to start to learnto distinguish when my history was being replayed to me so that I didn’t react like a wounded child. I was able toconnect with my Higher Power and respond like an adult. My ego-mind will do anything it needs to do to protect me from harm. Because of the trauma I experienced as a child, my ego mind created defenses to help me feel safe, sane and secure. Today, it is important for me to differentiate the uncomfortable feelings that are still rooted in my childhood from my spiritual powers that I now possess when I connect with my Higher Power.

There are three phases to this exercise which are:

Phase One relaxes you while it also begins to train your Ego-Mind to obey your Spirit as you command your mind to override your normal way of breathing. These beginning steps started to teach my ego-mind that my Higher Power is more powerful than my ego. This helped me to start to become more awake to my actions and reactions and their affect on others.

Phase Two quiets your mind-talk by directing your attention to your senses so that you can rehab your feelings by practicing how to process your environment through your five senses and feelings. This helped me to start
to feel my senses vs. processing them through my mind which had kept me hyper-vigilant and always on a defensive alert.

Phase Three teaches you how to FEEL the difference between your composite parts; specifically the difference between your Spirit (Higher Power) and body; body and vision; Spirit (Higher Power) and Ego-Mind. I love this part of the exercise because this is where I really learned how to feel my connection to my Higher Power.

In the beginning, this wasn’t a comfortable exercise for me to do. My ego-mind thoughts were trying to talk me
out of it and even tried to convince me that I didn’t need to do the exercise
anymore, that I had it down and could now move on. I can’t tell you how many times this same ego-mind
told me that I didn’t need to keep pursuing a path of recovery. Thank God I didn’t listen.

I am a Spirit who has a mind and a body. I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I have feelings, but I am not my
feelings. I have human identities (roles) such as woman, man, mother and doctor, but I am not the roles I play. I display behaviors, but I am not my good or bad behaviors. I am a spiritual being having a human experience.

The ability to feel the difference when your Ego-Mind is attempting “drag you into your past” with “rational lies” and any number of illusions that seem real, but which are only false projections to make you feel safe, sane and/or emotionally secure. This helped me to start to recover my true Spirit self from the wounded victim role that my ego-mind had me playing. When I started to recover my Self, I started to feel safer in my own skin.

The ability to be more aware when your “job titles” cause you to IDENTIFY who you are based on the roles that you play. With practice, you’ll be able to feel the difference between who you are (Spirit) from what you do. This will help you to be less co-dependent on others because you will be standing in your own truth.

The Spiritual Distinction Meditation will help you to master who you are now, an adult with adult powers and let go of who you were as a little, dependent child. This will help you to differentiate your uncomfortable feelings that are rooted in fear, and your spiritual powers of Self-mastery that you now possess as a Self-empowered
adult. Mastering this meditation, by practicing it daily for over a year, I started to permanently heal and recover
from the affects of alcoholism in my life. The wounded child trigger buttons slowly got dismantled, and though they
can still appear, I don’t react as quickly and can now respond like an adult. Mastering this meditation is taking the first
step using the HuMethod™ exercises with my recovery program.

Where you will receive daily coaching updates, words of wisdom, special savings offers

Visit HLC’s virtual bookstore and purchase an MP3 of the Spiritual Distinction Meditation. Try this exercise
and share any differences you are feeling. For those of you already experiencing the Spiritual Distinction Meditation, let us know how this has helped you. Next time we’ll talk about how, in Step 2, when I started to discover my beliefs I could ‘come to believe’… Keep coming – it works if you work it!

Coach Deborah Giddings,CSLC and Recovery Trainer

If you seek Recovery Coaching help for yourself or for a family member, if you
are an HLC CSLC or CIT, an addiction counselor or a recovery coach, or if you
are in Al-Anon, AA, OA, GA, NA, SLAA and you want to mastermind with Deborah you
can contact Deborah directly via her email [email protected]. Deborah is also available for speaking
engagements to share how her recovery journey was transformed by emotionalizing the HuMethod™ exercises.

To review from last week, first and foremost I am a Life Coach, so when we built HLC’s website one of my intentions was to make sure that it can be used by our life coach graduates to help them build their private life coach practices.

Remember to use the Methodology, Why HLC is the Best and Clinical Testing pages to prove to your clients that you have mastered how to facilitate professional life coaching methods that will help them to create the permanent behavioral changes that they desire.

Following are six more HLC website hyper-links that will bring you directly to pages that you can use to build your life coach practice. With very little effort you can blend these visual web pages into your maieutic clientele recruiting presentation. Using HLC’s website as part of your visual presentation will help you build your client base in the same way that HLC’s service educators do for HLC’s life coaches.

Suggested Reads: This page contains an abbreviated list of the books that were used to develop HLC’s clinically proven self-help exercises and life coach certification courses. Therefore, when your potential life coaching client reads this list they will realizes that they own several of these books, which will help them grok that you are the perfect life coach for them.

Spiritual Philosophies: This page contains spiritual hot buttons that your holistic target market appreciates and understands. If you will practice how to facilitate the info on this page using the maieutic method [especially the Self-parenting poem] you will find that it will help you register new life coaching clients because your client will experience how powerful your life coaching techniques really are.

Testimonials: This page contains 21 audio and text testimonials. I suggest that you familiarize your Self with all of them so you will know what exact testimonial will help your potential life coaching client relate to how your self-mastery exercises will help them quickly achieve their self-help and life coaching objectives.

Hire A Coach: This page has a very powerful client video testimonial from Dr Jane Sennett who has successfully used HLC’s life coaching methods to improve her life. Plus, if you charge lower life coaching rates than HLC does your client will see how much money you are saving them.

Self-mastery Book and CD Album: Maieuticly use this page to show your life coaching client how you will use these 16 Self-mastery lessons to improve the quality of their life.

Self-help Bookstore: HLC’s Bookstore contains over 75 self-help and life coaching products from $10-$25 [Mastery MP3s, e-Books, Self-programs, 50 Life Skill SMAs, etc]. You can use these self-help products to build your life coaching client base in the same way that HLC’s service educators do for HLC life